Notes

Other examples from this series form part of the MoMA collection.

'Dogs and donkeys, in particular, seemed to show up whenever I was photographing; they were simply part of the landscape. In the Nadir Series, I was conscious about making dogs the work’s central protagonists. I was also inspired by the dogs in Russell Hoban’s science fiction novel Ridley Walker (1980) and Ryszard Kapuscinski’s Another Day of Life (1976). Equally, if you look at much of the work coming out of South Africa during the 1980s, you’ll see that dogs, in their myriad variations (hyenas, police, dogs, feral street dogs, etc.), were part of the visual lexicon of that time.' —Jo Ractliffe ¹

^1. https://www.1854.photography/2021/08/jo-ractliffes-documentation-of-apartheid-was-distinct/, accessed 5 April 2023.

Provenance

The Association for Visual Arts, Cape Town, 1988.

Private Collection.

Exhibited

The Association for Visual Arts, Metropolitan Life Gallery, Market Gallery, Cape Town and Johannesburg, Nadir, 1988 to 1990, examples from the edition exhibited.